A year from now, it is possible that Aaron Mooy, with a year of English experience under his belt, will be welcomed by Pep Guardiola and prepared for a challenge to take on the best of Europe in the UEFA Champions League.
Possible but not very likely. Mooy is the third and best Australian player to head to Manchester City in recent times. Anthony Caceres and Luke Bratton were also sent to Manchester, never made an appearance for the club (or in Bratton’s case, for Bolton either, the second-tier club he was loaned out to) before being loaned to Melbourne City.
Mooy was arguably the best Australian playing in Australia and one of the standouts in Asia in the past year or so. I am not an agent but am pretty sure I could have got him a loan deal to Huddersfield, a club that finished 19th in the English Championship last season.
It seems fashionable in certain quarters in Australia to decry the English game (understandably so perhaps after recent events) and especially the lower leagues. The Championship is a major drop in quality from the Premier League but still, in global terms, it is a decent standard and highly competitive.
Still, as a fan of a fairly hapless team that still managed to finish above Huddersfield last season, it is not hard to say that Mooy is too good for this move.
If he was 18 or 19, it could be seen as a learning experience, a quick one step back before taking two or three forward later on in his career.
Even in that scenario, there would surely be better options. For a player approaching his 26th birthday, there definitely are.
The problem is that even if he is a success at Huddersfield, plays the games, makes an impact, then it is difficult to know where he goes from there.
To Manchester City? Does anyone really believe that good performances in the Championship will persuade the most highly sought-after coach in the world at a club that can afford anyone that he is the answer? Is Pep Guardiola going to tell Sheikh Mansour to put the $100 million meant for Pogba et al back in his pocket because there is a lad at Huddersfield who has had a good season? It’s possible but then so is the AFL making it big in China.
Even if he has a good season, the days when clubs in the Premier League took much notice of what is going on in the second tier are almost over, and they never dawned at all in Europe. There is a reasonable chance Mooy could earn a move to a lower half top-tier team in England but one of Australia’s best should be able to do that without spending a year in the second league.
It would be taking it too far to suggest that Mooy has a responsibility to other Australian players looking to move, but when a league’s standout heads for the bright lights of Europe only to end up at a club that just missed relegation to the English third tier then the trail being blazed is not exactly bright.
There was a time when City, when looking to loan out signings, talked of choosing good teams in European leagues that would help combat a player’s weaknesses. A little short of technique? There were friends in La Liga. A little more tactical nous? Then there was Serie A.
In this case, if Huddersfield is the answer, then I don’t really want to know what the question is.
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